AI Can Rewrite Code

Recently have heard some very good coders say, no can't happen professionally anytime soon.  True?  

AI Rewrites Coding  By Samuel Greengard

Communications of the ACM, April 2023, Vol. 66 No. 4, Pages 12-14   10.1145/3583083

Computer code intersects with almost every aspect of modern life. It runs factories, controls transportation networks, and defines the way we interact with personal devices. It is estimated that somewhere in the neighborhood of 2.8 trillion lines of code have been written over the last two decades alone.

Yet it is easy to overlook a basic fact: people have to write software—and that is often a long, tedious, and error-prone process. Although low-code and no-code environments have simplified things—and even allowed non-data scientists to build software through drag-and-drop interfaces—they still require considerable time and effort.

Enter artificial intelligence (AI). Over the last several years, various systems and frameworks have appeared that can automate code generation. For example, Amazon has developed CodeWhisperer, a coding assistant tool that automates coding in Python, Java, and JavaScript. GitHub's Copilot autogenerates code through natural language, and IBM's Project Wisdom is focused on building a framework that allows computers to program computers.

"As software becomes more complex and moves into the realm of non-developers and non-data scientists, there's a need for systems that can simplify and automate coding tasks," says Ruben Martins, an assistant research professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Adds Abraham Parangi, co-founder and CEO of Akkio, a firm that offers AI-assisted coding tools, "People have been working on these tools for many years. Suddenly, the trajectory is going vertical."

Although it is unlikely AI will eliminate jobs for developers anytime soon, it is poised to revolutionize the way software is created. For instance, OpenAI has introduced DALL-E 2, a tool that generates photorealistic images and art through natural language. In addition, the OpenAI Codex builds software in more than a dozen programming languages, including Python, Perl, Ruby, and PHP.

Observes Ruchir Puri, chief scientist for IBM Research, "The ability for computers to write code—and even program other computers—has the potential to fundamentally reshape the way we work and live."

Abstracting the Code

The idea of automating coding tasks is not new or particularly revolutionary. From punch cards to today's vast open source code libraries, the need to construct software from scratch has steadily declined. In recent years, low-code and no-code environments—which typically allow a person to drag-and-drop elements that represent pre-established tasks or functions—have greatly simplified software development, while expanding who can produce software.

Yet the emerging crop of AI tools turbocharge the concept. In some cases, these platforms anticipate tasks and suggest blocks of code—similar to the way applications now autopredict words and phrases in email and other documents. In other cases, they actually generate images, functions, and entire websites based on natural language input, or they suggest coding actions based on what the AI believes should happen next.

For example, Akkio's platform allows humans to build machine learning and other AI models for things like forecasting, text classification, and lead scoring, without ever interacting with code. It is a simple drag-and-drop proposition en route to a tool or app. "This makes it possible for people who have no knowledge of coding to accomplish all sorts of reasonably complicated tasks—and produce code without the formidable barriers of the past," Parangi explains.    .... '